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Except that this statement is false. There's newspaper reports from all over he US from the latter parts of 1859 of wildfires happening all over the place. Because the US had just covered itself in this really neat continent-sized antenna (the telegraph network) which was throwing sparks all over the place (feel free to peruse the references in this paper [leif.org]).

It's a shame that these days "Electric Universe" has become the new "conspiracy theory", triggering an instantaneous holier-than-thou ridicule from people who are not familiar with it and have never seriously studied it.

No scientist has any obligation to study each new theory that someone publishes. If they did that they wouldn't have any time left to do science. That's why there are scientific publications that are "peer reviewed".

When someone sends a paper to one of those magazines, the editor first checks the sender's credentials, to make sure he has done the preliminary work to study enough of the matter to get a degree, then he sends a copy of the paper to someone who knows enough of the subject to form an opinion.

If you want to publish an entirely new and revolutionary theory, like that "electric universe" thing, well, the burden of the proof is with you. It's not enough that your theory explains a grass fire that happened in 1859. Your theory also has to explain everything else that "conventional" physics (i.e. what's in peer researched papers) explain.

The "electric universe" isn't viewed as a "conspiracy theory" by scientists. It's just another of those thousands of theories that fail to explain the known facts of the universe.

I just can't believe that those damn scienticians keep rejecting the Time Cube Universe. Clearly there must be a conspiracy in the journals to prevent Mr. Ray from publishing his groundbreaking discoveries.

An even more likely explanation for the fires to get this big, is the fact that Putin fired a lot of firefighters and forest guards a few years ago. All the fire lanes that kept the forests compartmentalized are now gone, and that allows forest fires to get this far out of control.

That and apparently during those early lusty Soviet times, there was a grand vision to power the USSR and Moscow in particular with peat. Peat is in bogs. To burn it you have to get the water out. So they drained the bogs. Fast forward to the latter Soviet times when natural gas was discovered (no, I'm not talking about Politburo speeches) and a half century of Communist WTF 5 year projects caught up with them. So they dropped the peat idea and started cooking with gas. That was all nice and tidy but no one wanted to go back and rewater the bogs. Now, a bit of global warming, a bit of La Nina, a bit of nasty drought...add some lightning, dumb Russians tossing their cigarette butts in the bogs, etc. and we have the spectacle of Putin pushing a button on a fire plane to drop a giant raindrop of water to show his solidarity with the proles.

The only reason the bogs didn't attempt to kill the Russians before was the amount of rainfall they normally receive which put out the bog fires they normally have. That works fine until you have a drought, and even more Russian screwups like you mentioned.

Whoever these Nazis are, they seem to have far less power than you imagine. Controlled burns are proceeding everywhere. We just had a swathe of bush backing onto our place burnt a few months ago, thank you RFS. Do you live in the city or something?

we wouldn't have the magnitude of devestation [sic.] that hits so often

Well how you explain the Victorian fires then? Taking into consideration the intensive hazard reduction campaign undertaken in the year leading up to them.

Could the frequency of extreme fire events during the last decade have had anything to do with that much of SW-Australia was in one of the -- if not the --deepest and most prolonged droughts in history? Could it have had anything to do with record breaking spells of hot weather --especially in Victoria, where Melbourne not only recorded it's single hottest temperature on record, but where the state recorded it's longest run of extreme heat?... low humidity?...

I could have added that the most devastating events involved crown fires, which don't respect our puny attempts at burning off.

Now it may have been true that too little hazard reduction had been undertaken in the years leading up to the first in the series of truly horrific seasons, the summer of 2000-01. But, at least where I live, that all changed pretty quickly thereafter (along with the building codes). And there was an day this winter when the Sydney CBD was choked with smoke from burning in the Blue

I've had just about enough of this "Sun". First, we've learned it's to blame for global warming, now it's setting fires throughout the world. Why, why does it hate our liberties? How many innocents must die of skin cancer before someone acts? How many children must we let it burn on metal playground equipment? When will it strike you with sunburn in your very own backyard?? The world must stand up to this terrorism! We must strike fast and we must strike hard! All good men must stand up and demand the world governments strike with the biggest atomic - no, hydrogen bomb and wipe this great evil from the sky above!!!

Urge your leaders to act now before it is to late! Think of the children!

No, they're Oracle, so they've seen much more than anyone else. This is just some secret scheme. They distract us with strange stunts, like suing Google, while Sun accumulates enough heat to FRY THE WHOLE EARTH! Devious plan, it is.

So their logic is that the telegraph (so phone, now?) lines can get overwhelmed and break, sparking fires?

Wow, that seems like a long way to go. (For one thing, I think that phone and power lines have more protection on them now. You might overload a transformer or even take down an entire grid, but I should think widespread sparking would be uncommon. They'd have had problems all over in Canada already, if not.)

NASA SP-426, "Sun, Weather, and Climate, 1978m John R. Herman and Richard A. Goldberg, republished 1985 by Dover
Publications, Inc.
Section 3.2 talks about correlations with the 22 year Hale Solar Cycle (the 11 year cycles have alternate polarity).
Rainfall and drought are the first two mentioned..... not exactly the solar storm, but still the sun

Correlation does not imply causation. There are a boatload of other factors that take place. This planet used to be very lush with rain forests. And with the ever increasing population of man on this planet, and our need to destroy without care, lower rainfall amounts and drought are more likely to occur. So as we lose more and more forest / rain forests the correlations will appear to be more and will be naturally lead people to believe that it is causeation.

It's happened many times before. Of particularly interesting note are the legends of "the gods" from various societies which have arisen shortly after periods of relatively poor advancement.

The solar storms output huge amounts of radiation - electromagnetic as well as other frequencies. Being as the earth is, essentially, a large (but significantly smaller than the sun) magnet, the interference with the Earth's magnetic/electrical field will quite certainly have observable effects: increased/more intense st

Wait a second before we destroy the Sun!
What if these CMEs and radiation caused the mutations which differentiated our species?
We could be risking future evolutionary improvements by removing this source for modifying DNA.
Of course, we could start a government sponsored project to randomly administer bursts of mutating radiation in the hopes of creating a better species....
Oh wait, never mind, we already have cellphones.

Let's say there is another massive CME, or one even more massive than the one in 1859. How would you protect your electronics? Would you shove them into anti-static bags? Would they need to be (nearly) air tight, or would it be sufficient to just drape the bags over things? Would that would work for hard drives, cell phones, and if you had some large enough, PCs as well? What about data centers? Obviously, unplugging them would be a requirement, too.